1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to sensors for characterizing patients suffering from congestive heart failure (CHF) and related diseases.
2. Description of the Related Art
CHF occurs when the heart is unable to sufficiently pump and distribute blood to meet the body's needs. CHF is typically preceded by an increase of fluid in the thoracic cavity, and can by characterized by shortness of breath, swelling of the legs and other appendages, and intolerance to exercise. It affects nearly 5.3 M Americans and has an accompanying cost of somewhere between $30-50 B, with roughly $17 B attributed to hospital readmissions. Such events are particularly expensive to hospitals, as readmissions occurring within a 30-day period are not reimbursable by Medicare or private insurance as of October 2012.
In medical centers, CHF is typically detected using Doppler/ultrasound, which measures parameters such as stroke volume (SV), cardiac output (CO), and ejection fraction (EF). Gradual weight gain measured with a simple scale is one method to indicate CHF in the home environment. However, this parameter is typically not sensitive enough to detect the early onset of CHF, a particularly important time when the condition may be ameliorated by a change in medication or diet.
SV is the mathematical difference between left ventricular end-diastolic volume (EDV) and end-systolic volume (ESV), and represents the volume of blood ejected by the left ventricle with each heartbeat; a typical value is about 80 mL. EF relates to EDV and ESV as described below in Eq. 1, with a typical value for healthy individuals being about 50-65%, and an ejection fraction of less than 40% indicating systolic heart failure.
                                                        EF              =                            ⁢                              SV                EDV                                                                                        =                            ⁢                                                EDV                  -                  ESV                                EDV                                                                        (        1        )            
CO is the average, time-dependent volume of blood ejected from the left ventricle into the aorta and, informally, indicates how efficiently a patient's heart pumps blood through their arterial tree; a typical value is about 5 L/min. CO is the product of HR and SV, i.e.:CO=SV×HR  (2)
CHF patients, in particular those suffering from systolic heart failure, may receive implanted devices, such as pacemakers and/or implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, to increase EF and subsequent blood flow throughout the body. These devices also include technologies called ‘OptiVol’ (from Medtronic) or ‘CorVue’ (St. Jude) that use circuitry and algorithms within the implanted device to measure the electrical impedance between different leads of the pacemaker. As thoracic fluid increases in the CHF patient, the impedance typically is reduced. Thus this parameter, when read by an interrogating device placed outside the patient's body, can indicate the onset of heart failure.
Corventis Inc. has developed the AVIVO™ Mobile Patient Management (MPM) System to characterize ambulatory CHF patients. AVIVO™ is typically used over a 7-day period, during which it provides continual insight into a patient's physiological status by steadily collecting data and wirelessly transmitting it through a small handheld device to a central server for analysis and review. The system consists of three parts: 1) The PiiX™ sensor, a patient-worn adhesive device that resembles a large (approximately 15″ long) bandage and measures fluid status, electrocardiography (ECG) waveforms, heart rate (HR), respiration rate, patient activity, and posture; 2) The zLink™ Mobile Transmitter, a small, handheld device that receives information from the Piix™ sensor and then transmits data wirelessly to a remote server via cellular technology; and 3) the Corventis Monitoring Center, where data are collected and analyzed. Technicians staff the Monitoring Center, review the incoming data, and in response generate clinical reports made available to prescribing physicians by way of a web-based user interface.
In some cases, physicians can prescribe ECG monitors to ambulatory CHF patients. These systems measure time-dependent waveforms, from which heart rate HR and information related to arrhythmias and other cardiac properties are extracted. They characterize ambulatory patients over short periods (e.g. 24-48 hours) using ‘holier’ monitors, or over longer periods (e.g. 1-3 weeks) using cardiac event monitors. Conventional holter or event monitors typically include a collection of chest-worn ECG electrodes (typically 3 or 5), an ECG circuit that collects analog signals from the ECG electrodes and converts these into multi-lead ECG waveforms; a processing unit then analyzes the ECG waveforms to determine cardiac information. Typically the patient wears the entire system on their body. Some modern ECG-monitoring systems include wireless capabilities that transmit ECG waveforms and other numerical data through a cellular interface to an Internet-based system, where they are further analyzed to generate, for example, reports describing the patient's cardiac rhythm. In less sophisticated systems, the ECG-monitoring system is worn by the patient, and then returned to a company that downloads all relevant information into a computer, which then analyzes it to generate the report. The report, for example, may be imported into the patient's electronic medical record (EMR). The EMR avails the report to cardiologists or other clinicians, who then use it to help characterize the patient.
Measuring CO and SV in a continuous, non-invasive manner with high clinical accuracy has often been considered a ‘holy grail’ of medical-device monitoring. Most existing techniques in this field require in-dwelling catheters, which in turn can lead to complications with the patient, are inherently inaccurate in the critically ill, and require a specially trained operator. For example, current ‘gold standards’ for this measurement are thermodilution cardiac output (TDCO) and the Fick Oxygen Principal (Fick). However both TDCO and Fick are highly invasive techniques that can cause infection and other complications, even in carefully controlled hospital environments. In TDCO, a pulmonary artery catheter (PAC), also known as a Swan-Ganz catheter, is typically inserted into the right portion of the patient's heart. Procedurally a bolus (typically 10 ml) of glucose or saline that is cooled to a known temperature is injected through the PAC. A temperature-measuring device within the PAC, located a known distance away (typically 6-10 cm) from where fluid is injected, measures the progressively increasing temperature of the diluted blood. CO is then estimated from a measured time-temperature curve, called the ‘thermodilution curve’. The larger the area under this curve, the lower the cardiac output Likewise, the smaller the area under the curve implies a shorter transit time for the cold bolus to dissipate, hence a higher CO.
Fick involves calculating oxygen consumed and disseminated throughout the patient's blood over a given time period. An algorithm associated with the technique incorporates consumption of oxygen as measured with a spirometer with the difference in oxygen content of centralized blood measured from a PAC and oxygen content of peripheral arterial blood measured from an in-dwelling cannula.
Both TD and Fick typically measure CO with accuracies between about 0.5-1.0 l/min, or about +/−20% in the critically ill.
Several non-invasive techniques for measuring CO and SV have been developed with the hope of curing the deficiencies of Fick and TD. For example, Doppler-based ultrasonic echo (Doppler/ultrasound) measures blood velocity using the well-known Doppler shift, and has shown reasonable accuracy compared to more invasive methods. But both two and three-dimensional versions of this technique require a specially trained human operator, and are thus, with the exception of the esophageal Doppler technique, impractical for continuous measurements. CO and SV can also be measured with techniques that rely on electrodes placed on the patient's torso that inject and then collect a low-amperage, high-frequency modulated electrical current. These techniques, based on electrical bioimpedance and called ‘impedance cardiography’ (ICG), ‘electrical cardiometry velocimetry’ (ECV), and ‘bioreactance’ (BR), measure a time-dependent electrical waveform that is modulated by the flow of blood through the patient's thorax. Blood is a good electrical conductor, and when pumped by the heart can further modulate the current injected by these techniques in a manner sensitive to the patient's CO. During a measurement, ICG, ECV, and BR each extract properties called left ventricular ejection time (LVET) and pre-injection period (PEP) from time-dependent ICG and ECG waveforms. A processor then analyzes the waveform with an empirical mathematical equation, shown below in Eq. 3, to estimate SV. CO is then determined from the product of SV and HR, as described above in Eq. 2.
ICG, ECV, and BR all represent a continuous, non-invasive alternative for measuring CO/SV, and in theory can be conducted with an inexpensive system and no specially trained operator. But the medical community has not embraced such methods, despite the fact that clinical studies have shown them to be effective with some patient populations. In 1992, for example, an analysis by Fuller et al. analyzed data from 75 published studies describing the correlation between ICG and TD/Fick (Fuller et al., The validity of cardiac output measurement by thoracic impedance: a meta-analysis; Clinical Investigative Medicine; 15: 103-112 (1992)). The study concluded using a meta analysis wherein, in 28 of these trials, ICG displayed a correlation of between r=0.80-0.83 against TDCO, dye dilution and Fick CO. Patients classified as critically ill, e.g. those suffering from acute myocardial infarction, sepsis, and excessive lung fluids, yielded worse results. Further impeding commercial acceptance of these techniques is the tendency of ICG monitors to be relatively bulky and similar in both size and complexity to conventional vital signs monitors. This means two large and expensive pieces of monitoring equipment may need to be located bedside in order to monitor a patient's vital signs and CO/SV. For this and other reasons, impedance-based measurements of CO have not achieved widespread commercial success.